6 ms·
maybe I am a fool, does space-based AI make no sense at all?
by teacpde 8mo ago
maybe I am a fool, does space-based AI make no sense at all?
- idontwantthis 8mo agoWatts=heat Heat has nowhere to go in space. Read about how much engineering went into cooling the ISS and now multiply that by billions.
- reverius42 8mo agoA lot of people who are a little bit ignorant think it's really easy to cool things in space because space is notoriously very cold. Physics, it turns out, is slightly more complicated than this and it turns out vacuum is an incredibly good insulator and more (much more) than offsets the temperature differential in terms of how easy it is to cool something.
- fluoridation 8mo agoNo. Imagine if your computer was in space instead of being under your desk. Would that solve anything? Orbit is a very inconvenient environment. It's difficult to reach so maintenance is a nightmare, it's moving all the time, there's nowhere to sink waste heat into, you have a constrained power budget, you have a constrained weight budget. The only things you want to put in orbit are things that absolutely can't go anywhere else.
- rhetocj23 8mo ago[dead]
- andsoitis 8mo ago> maybe I am a fool, does space-based AI make no sense at all? I think it does, for what it’s worth if we are to extend intelligence (as we know it) and potentially consciousness out there into the galaxy. Because of distances and time, it is unlikely that humans will populate the galaxy with biological offspring (barring some technical breakthroughs that we have no line of sight on). AI, on the other hand, could theoretically populate the galaxy and beyond, carrying the human intelligence and consciousness story into the future.
- bandrami 8mo agoLiterally none. Space is the worst possible place to put something that overheats already on earth. There's probably some synergy in the other direction (AI piloting of satellites or whatever) but that's marginal at best.
- WalterBright 8mo agoI've sure they've considered that in the engineering. For example, the solar panels would shade it. The space station has a cooling system in it. Musk's Starlink satellites don't seem to be overheating.
- bandrami 8mo agoThe problem is not shading them from the Sun. And the starlink satellites run at about 1 kW
- bdangubic 8mo agogood read: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/ https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
- WalterBright 8mo agoIt is a good read. Thank you.
- WalterBright 8mo agoThere's another way to look at it, though. If the data center satellites can be built and launched cheap enough, you can still come out ahead on performance/cost. I.e. if the space data center has 1/10 the performance of a ground one, and they can be built and launched for less than 10% of the cost, then you've got a business. And there are costs that won't be incurred - no electric bill, no cost for land, no charge for maintenance. I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss Musk.
- baq 8mo agoit absolutely doesn't unless there's a magical unobtainium cooling tech Musk got his hands on
- sleepybrett 8mo agoThinking a bit, ORBITAL ai makes little to no sense, nowhere to dump your heat, your gpus are going to be slag or only operate part of the time. But what if he put them on the moon? the lag time is what ~1.2s? That seems like an amount of time that a current AI query can take and still seem reasonable. Not that I think it's anything but him allowing some investors to cash out when spacex goes public. Hell didn't he just shift 2billion from tesla to xai? At the end of the day he will never see whatever bullshit he's peddling in the media about this sale his drug habit is going to kill him before then.
- reverius42 8mo agoDoes the moon offer much heat dissipation potential vs. orbit? The lunar surface seems like an almost-as-harsh environment.
- reverius42 8mo agoAlso 1.2 seconds is like ridiculously long, unacceptable latency.
- sleepybrett 8mo agoMy contention is that for large ai query, it's not that unacceptable.
- sleepybrett 8mo agoThere is a whole fucking moon you can embed heatsinks into.
- reverius42 8mo agoThat's a good point, the rock you're sitting on is basically a giant heat sink.